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Hi All!
I've had a way that I challenge myself whenever I would come across boards with just a single prior play. I would specifically look for boards where that one prior player had a relatively lower number of points and words (say less than 125 points and 30 words on a 4x4 board), then play it with the aim of playing every single word that they had. This sounds like it might not be too difficult, but I just couldn't get it done with any board, no matter how few words that person before me had played.
With February's reset of the boards, it gave me a chance to play a lot of boards with just a single play, but again it was one close call after another. A couple of dynamics seem to come into play, including the tendency of each of our brains to go looking for our own unique set of tried and trusted words. So I would fail on my objective by missing words that weren't necessarily complex or long just because I have perhaps never played them and my brain isn't on the lookout - one example is not playing only the word 'kob' which I don't think I've ever played, even when trying out letter combinations when I've run out of words I know.
Another dynamic that became more obvious after the reset is the number of players whose key or only aim is to find long, complex words. I took a screen shot (that I'll include if I can) of the most notable example of this where I played 95 words without finding the one word played by the prior person - assemblies.
So I was trying and failing to kill my white whale throughout February and eventually moved on to another game to kill spare time. I started playing again a little bit this past week and was stunned to actually accomplish my goal on a board where the prior player had 80 points and 23 words. Even here, it was a close shave, insofar as I found myself with time at the end to type possible letter combos and came up with slopy, which I didn't recognize as a word.
Anyway, I thought I would share this method of play in light of the high availability of once-played boards and see if anyone else might play the game in this same way? And if so, what's your highest score and word count? I myself don't have a lot of confidence in beating 80/23 anytime soon, but perhaps with luck I could get something as high as 100/30 some day.
John
P.S. I'll also include a screen shot of a board where there was exactly zero overlap between my 112 words and the prior player's 9 words. This was fantastically improbable in its own different way.
Edit - couldn't figure out how to get a full-sized image posted using either of two options, and I don't know if it's kosher to link to imgur?? https://imgur.com/a/beluV51
I've had a way that I challenge myself whenever I would come across boards with just a single prior play. I would specifically look for boards where that one prior player had a relatively lower number of points and words (say less than 125 points and 30 words on a 4x4 board), then play it with the aim of playing every single word that they had. This sounds like it might not be too difficult, but I just couldn't get it done with any board, no matter how few words that person before me had played.
With February's reset of the boards, it gave me a chance to play a lot of boards with just a single play, but again it was one close call after another. A couple of dynamics seem to come into play, including the tendency of each of our brains to go looking for our own unique set of tried and trusted words. So I would fail on my objective by missing words that weren't necessarily complex or long just because I have perhaps never played them and my brain isn't on the lookout - one example is not playing only the word 'kob' which I don't think I've ever played, even when trying out letter combinations when I've run out of words I know.
Another dynamic that became more obvious after the reset is the number of players whose key or only aim is to find long, complex words. I took a screen shot (that I'll include if I can) of the most notable example of this where I played 95 words without finding the one word played by the prior person - assemblies.
So I was trying and failing to kill my white whale throughout February and eventually moved on to another game to kill spare time. I started playing again a little bit this past week and was stunned to actually accomplish my goal on a board where the prior player had 80 points and 23 words. Even here, it was a close shave, insofar as I found myself with time at the end to type possible letter combos and came up with slopy, which I didn't recognize as a word.
Anyway, I thought I would share this method of play in light of the high availability of once-played boards and see if anyone else might play the game in this same way? And if so, what's your highest score and word count? I myself don't have a lot of confidence in beating 80/23 anytime soon, but perhaps with luck I could get something as high as 100/30 some day.
John
P.S. I'll also include a screen shot of a board where there was exactly zero overlap between my 112 words and the prior player's 9 words. This was fantastically improbable in its own different way.
Edit - couldn't figure out how to get a full-sized image posted using either of two options, and I don't know if it's kosher to link to imgur?? https://imgur.com/a/beluV51
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